It was a pleasure, last Wednesday – May 10, to participate in a panel with Juca Ferreira (Ex-Minister of Culture in Brasil) and Cyrille Brissot (French artists) to discuss the topic of ‘Artists in defense of democracy’.this panel was the first of a series of other panels under the project “Memórias Contemporâneas” a collaboration between

In my intervention, I was mainly tackling the question of ‘Does artists works in defense of democracy or in defense of the democracy of art itself?’ raising up question about how the international art scene is functioning vis-a-vis the notion of ‘democracy’ where most of the time ‘democracy’ become a product for sale. I also tried to point out that there is a lot be done on the local scene, specially on the institutions level, taking as example Lina Bo Bardi project for The Museum of Modern Art in Salvador, where she proposed a model that is based on building a collection for the museum but also to open the space for Bahian popular art that didn’t have access to the museum before. And the most important part of her proposal remained in creating a school of the museum, and to transform the museum to space where not art is only exhibited but also produced, and where local artists can learn, experiment and mature their work. One of the proofs that Bo Bardi’s project was in defense of democracy, is that her project was interrupted by the military dictatorship in Salvador, probably because it was a real threat to dictatorship.